Field
This disclosure is generally related to distribution of digital content. More specifically, this disclosure is related to header compression of a CCN message.
Related Art
The proliferation of the Internet and e-commerce continues to create a vast amount of digital content. Content-centric network (CCN) architectures have been designed to facilitate accessing and processing such digital content. A CCN includes entities, or nodes, such as network clients, forwarders (e.g., routers), and content producers, which communicate with each other by sending “interest” packets for various content items and receiving “content object” packets in return. CCN interests and content objects are identified by their unique names, which are typically hierarchically structured variable length identifiers (HSVLI). An HSVLI can include contiguous name components ordered from a most general level to a most specific level.
A CCN message (e.g., a message from a CCN node) may include a number of repeated fields in its header. In addition to actual values of different fields, the header may carry field information (e.g., type and length) associated with the fields. For example, different name components of an HSVLI can have different values as well their corresponding types and lengths. However, since each component of the HSVLI can be of type “name,” the same field information is repeated. As a result, the information in the header of a CCN message can become repetitious and lead to inefficient resource utilization while forwarding the packets.